Secret Service director can raise alcohol standards immediately

Even though Clancy acknowledged that an “element” of the Secret Service depends too heavily on alcohol to cope with the stress of the job, he said it would take time to change the culture of the agency.

Clancy also said he would wait months until an investigation of the incident is complete before taking any concrete step to respond beyond issuing a intra-agency statement condemning the episode.

“Deep down people want to see discipline, people want to be disciplined. They want to have people held accountable,” he told a House Appropriations subcommittee Tuesday. “I just want to respect the due process, as frustrating as that is, and let my actions speak for how we are going to move forward as an agency.”

Clancy was referring to disciplinary decisions relating to the two agents accused of off-duty drinking and then driving their government-owned vehicles onto White House property. The two agents, he said, cannot be terminated immediately because they’re protected federal employees who deserve due process until the investigation is complete.

He also suggested that the allegations could be overblown by recounting the sequence of events that occurred that night as captured on a short video surveillance tape.

Clancy said the pair were returning to the White House to pick up one of the agent’s government-owned vehicles parked there. He said the two drove at a very slow speed onto the White House complex when their car “nudged” an orange “construction-type barrel,” which did not fall over, before moving up the check point and showing their badges to get through. He did not comment directly on the vehicle’s alleged disruption of the suspicious package investigation.

It will never be known whether the two agents were legally drunk or over the allowable blood-alcohol level to drive because a supervisor at the White House that night made a decision to let them go home without arresting them or administering sobriety tests, another troublesome part of the incident now under review.

But Clancy has plenty of power to take other steps to send a strong message that a culture of drinking and misbehavior needs to change immediately.

Last year — after an incident in which an agent was found passed out in a Dutch hallway after drinking and an accident in the Florida Keys involving two agents in which drinking was suspected — the agency imposed a rule barring agents from consuming alcohol within 10 hours of starting a shift and within 24 hours of a president’s arrival on a trip.

Other than that, Clancy conceded during Tuesday’s testimony that the agency doesn’t have any other protocols dealing with agents’ drinking after hours although he said agents are prohibited from falling within the legal drunk-driving limits while operating a government-owned vehicle.

The Secret Service, however, can tighten its protocols and penalties for alcohol-related offenses any time it chooses, according to Cheri Cannon, a partner at the law firm Tully Rinckey who specializes in federal labor and employment law.

“Each agency, within certain guidelines, is free to set its own rules in its Table of Penalties and they can set it within any limits they want as long as there are no statutory penalties required by law,” Cannon said.

Table of Penalties are internal guidelines for different infractions and potential disciplinary action that each agency maintains in order to provide employees assurance that it is responding to offenses in a uniform manner.

Larry Berger, an attorney who has served as a general counsel for the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association, says the FBI has much higher standards than the Secret Service for alcohol-related incidents.

For instance, he says, the Bureau requires at least a 30-day suspension without pay for an off-duty drunk-driving charge, even in a personal vehicle.

“And it goes up from there, depending on the circumstance,” he told the Washington Examiner.

In 2009, the Transportation Security Administration also began imposing a 30-day suspension without pay for federal air marshals arrested on drunk-driving charges to bring the policy in line with other federal law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, according to a report in ProPublica.org.

In contrast, the Secret Service’s penalty for a drunk-driving conviction — not a charge — in a personal vehicle is a 14-day suspension without pay. A conviction in a government-owned vehicle results in a “standard” penalty of 45 days suspension without pay, according to a Secret Service spokesman.

Members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee were shown the surveillance video of the incident in question Tuesday afternoon.

Those who have viewed the video footage say it calls into question many of the explosive-sounding elements of the Washington Post’s original report, which was later toned down through several iterations.

Members earlier in the day were obviously frustrated by Clancy’s failure to respond more forcefully to the latest incident of alleged misconduct.

“We’ve got to have some changes, and you’ve got to be the one that makes those changes,” said Rep. Hal Rogers, R-Ky., the chairman of the Appropriations Committee. “And I don’t sense at this moment that you have the determination to make that happen.”

Rep. Nita Lowey, D-N.Y., and the ranking member of the panel, said she was “puzzled” that Clancy said that changing the culture at the agency would be a slow process.

Rep. Chris Stewart, R-Utah, a former Air Force pilot who set three world speed records, said he was “stunned by this environment and this culture” in the Secret Service.

“I hear you say, well, you know, people are coping with stress,” he said. “And I’ve got to say — I kind of go, please, oh, please, because lots of people experience stress. This is a stressful job, but there’s lots of stressful jobs in the world. And military members experience acute stress and they would never protect nor sanction behavior such as this.”